Chapter VIII: Part 8

This event, of capital importance for the middle ages, was fertile in results both beneficial and the reverse. It brought about the rupture between the West and Constantinople. Then Charlemagne raised the papacy on the ruins of Lombardy to the position of first political power in Italy; and the universal Church, headed by the pope, made common cause with the Empire, which all the thinkers of that day regarded as the ideal state. Confusion between these powers was inevitable, but at this time neither Charles, the pope, nor the people had a suspicion of the troubles latent in the ceremony that seemed so simple. Thirdly, Charlemagne's title of emperor strengthened his other title of king of the Franks, as is proved by the fact that at the great assembly of Aix-la-Chapelle in 802 he demanded from all, whether lay or spiritual, a new oath of allegiance to himself as Caesar. His increased power came rather from moral value, from the prestige attaching to one who had given proof of it, than from actual authority over men or centralization; this is shown by the division between the Empire and feudalism. Universal sovereignty claimed as a heritage from Rome had a profound influence upon popular imagination, but in no way modified that tendency to separation of the various nations which was already manifest. Charles himself in his government preferred to restore the ancient Empire by vigorous personal action, rather than to follow old imperial traditions; he introduced cohesion into his "palace," and perfect centralization into his official administration, inspiring his followers and servants, clerical and lay, with a common and determined zeal. The system was kept in full vigour by the _missi dominici_, who regularly reported or reformed any abuses of administration, and by the courts, military, judicial or political, which brought to Charlemagne the strength of the wealth of his subjects, carrying his commands and his ideas to the farthest limits of the Empire. Under him there was in fact a kind of early renaissance after centuries of barbarism and ignorance.

The Carolingian Renaissance.

This emperor, who assumed so high a tone with his subjects, his bishops and his counts, who undertook to uphold public order in civil life, held himself no less responsible for the eternal salvation of men's souls in the other world. Thanks to Charlemagne, and through the restoration of order and of the schools, a common civilization was prepared for the varied elements of the Empire. By his means the Church was able to concentrate in the palatine academy all the intellectual culture of the middle ages, having preserved some of the ancient traditions of organization and administration and guarded the imperial ideal. Charlemagne apparently wished, like Theodoric, to use German blood and Christian unity to bring back life to the great body of the Empire. Not the equal of Caesar or Augustus in genius or in the lastingness of his work, he yet recalls them in his capitularies, his periodic courts, his official hierarchy, his royal emissaries, his ministers, his sole right of coinage, his great public works, his campaigns against barbarism and heathenry, his zeal for learning and literature, and his divinity as emperor. Once more there existed a great public entity such as had not been seen for many years; but its duration was not to be a long one.

Dissolution of the Frankish Empire.

Charlemagne had for the moment succeeded in uniting western Europe under his sway, but he had not been able to arrest its evolution towards feudal dismemberment. He had, doubtless conscientiously, laboured for the reconstitution of the Empire; but it often happens that individual wills produce results other than those at which they aimed, sometimes results even contrary to their wishes, and this was what happened in Charlemagne's case. He had restored the superstructure of the imperial monarchy, but he had likewise strengthened and legalized methods and institutions till then private and insecure, and these, passing from custom into law, undermined the foundations of the structure he had thought himself to be repairing. A quarter of a century after his death his Empire was in ruins.

The practice of giving land as a _beneficium_ to a grantee who swore personal allegiance to the grantor had persisted, and by his capitularies Charlemagne had made these personal engagements, these contracts of immunity--hitherto not transferable, nor even for life, but quite conditional--regular, legal, even obligatory and almost indissoluble. The _beneficium_ was to be as practically irrevocable as the oath of fidelity. He submitted to the yoke of the social system and feudal institutions at the very moment when he was attempting to revive royal authority; he was ruler of the state, but ruler of vassals also. The monarchical principle no longer sufficed to ensure social discipline; the fear of forfeiting the grant became the only powerful guarantee of obedience, and as this only applied to his personal vassals, Charlemagne gave up his claim to direct obedience from the rest of the people, accepting the mediation of the counts, lords and bishops, who levied taxes, adjudicated and administered in virtue of the privileges of patronage, not of the right of the state. The very multiplication of offices, so noticeable at this time, furthered this triumph of feudalism by multiplying the links of personal dependence, and neutralizing more and more the direct action of the central authority. The frequent convocations of military assemblies, far from testifying to political liberty, was simply a means of communicating the emperor's commands to the various feudal groups.

Thus Charlemagne, far from opposing, systematized feudalism, in order that obedience and discipline might pass from one man to another down to the lowest grades of society, and he succeeded for his own lifetime. No authority was more weighty or more respected than that of this feudal lord of Gaul, Italy and Germany; none was more transient, because it was so purely personal.

Causes for the dissolution of the Empire.

When the great emperor was buried at Aix-la-Chapelle in 814, his work was entombed with him. The fact was that his successors were incapable of maintaining it. Twenty-nine years after his death the Carolingian Empire had been divided into three kingdoms; forty years later one alone of these kingdoms had split into seven; while when a century had passed France was a litter of tiny states each practically independent. This disintegration was caused neither by racial hate nor by linguistic patriotism. It was the weakness of princes, the discouragement of freemen and landholders confronted by an inexorable system of financial and military tyranny, and the incompatibility of a vast empire with a too primitive governmental system, that wrecked the work of Charlemagne.

Louis the Pious (814-840).

The Empire fell to Louis the Pious, sole survivor of his three sons. At the Aix assembly in 813 his father had crowned him with his own hand, thus avoiding the papal sanction that had been almost forced upon himself in 800. Louis was a gentle and well-trained prince, but weak and prone to excessive devotion to the Church. He had only reigned a few years when dissensions broke out on all sides, as under the Merovingians. Charlemagne had assigned their portions to his three sons in 781 and again in 806; like Charles Martel and Pippin the Short before him, however, what he had divided was not the imperial authority, nor yet countries, but the whole system of fiefs, offices and adherents which had been his own patrimony. The division that Louis the Pious made at Aix in 817 among his three sons, Lothair, Pippin and Louis, was of like character, since he reserved the supreme authority for himself, only associating Lothair, the eldest, with him in the government of the empire. Following the advice of his ministers Walla and Agobard, supporters of the policy of unity, Louis the Pious put Bernard of Italy, Charlemagne's grandson, to death for refusing to acknowledge Lothair as co-emperor; crushed a revolt in Brittany; and carried on among the Danes the work of evangelization begun among the Slavs. A fourth son, Charles, was born to him by his second wife, Judith of Bavaria. Jealousy arose between the children of the two marriages. Louis tried in vain to satisfy his sons and their followers by repeated divisions--at Worms (829) and at Aix (831)--in which there was no longer question of either unity or subordination. Yet his elder sons revolted against him in 831 and 832, and were supported by Walla and Agobard and by their followers, weary of all the contradictory oaths demanded of them. Louis was deposed at the assembly of Compiègne (833), the bishops forcing him to assume the garb of a penitent; but he was re-established on his throne in St Etienne at Metz, the 28th of February 835, from which time until his death in 840 he fell more and more under the influence of his ambitious wife, and thought only of securing an inheritance for Charles, his favourite son.

The sons of Louis the Pious.

The Strassburg oath.

Hardly was Louis buried in the basilica of Metz before his sons flew to arms. The first dynastic war broke out between Lothair, who by the settlement of 817 claimed the whole monarchy with the imperial title, and his brothers Louis and Charles. Lothair wanted, with the Empire, the sole right of patronage over the adherents of his house, but each of these latter chose his own lord according to individual interests, obeying his fears or his preferences. The three brothers finished their discussion by fighting for a whole day (June 25th, 841) on the plain of Fontanet by Auxerre; but the battle decided nothing, so Charles and Louis, in order to get the better of Lothair, allied themselves and their vassals by an oath taken in the plain of Strassburg (Feb. 14th, 842). This, the first document in the vulgar tongue in the history of France and Germany, was merely a mutual contract of protection for the two armies, which nevertheless did not risk another battle. An amicable division of the imperial succession was arranged, and after an assessment of the empire which took almost a year, an agreement was signed at Verdun in August 843.

Partition of the Empire at Verdun (843).

This was one of the important events in history. Each brother received an equal share of the dismembered empire. Louis had the territory on the right bank of the Rhine, with Spires, Worms and Mainz "because of the abundance of wine." Lothair took Italy, the valleys of the Rhône, the Saône and the Meuse, with the two capitals of the empire, Aix-la-Chapelle and Rome, and the title of emperor. Charles had all the country watered by the Scheldt, the Seine, the Loire and the Garonne, as far as the Atlantic and the Ebro. The partition of Verdun separated once more, and definitively, the lands of the eastern and western Franks. The former became modern Germany, the latter France, and each from this time forward had its own national existence. However, as the boundary between the possessions of Charles the Bald and those of Louis was not strictly defined, and as Lothair's kingdom, having no national basis, soon disintegrated into the kingdoms of Italy, Burgundy and Arles, in Lotharingia, this great undefined territory was to serve as a tilting-ground for France and Germany on the very morrow of the treaty of Verdun and for ten centuries after.

Charles the Bald (843-877).

Charles the Bald was the first king of western France. Anxious as he was to preserve Charlemagne's traditions of government, he was not always strong enough to do so, and warfare within his own dominions was often forced on him. The Norse pirates who had troubled Charlemagne showed a preference for western France, justified by the easy access afforded by river estuaries with rich monasteries on their shores. They began in 841 with the sack of Rouen; and from then until 912, when they made a settlement in one part of the country, though few in numbers they never ceased attacking Charles's kingdom, coming in their ships up the Loire as far as Auvergne, up the Garonne to Toulouse, and up the Seine and the Scheldt to Paris, where they made four descents in forty years, burning towns, pillaging treasure, destroying harvests and slaughtering the peasants or carrying them off into slavery. Charles the Bald thus spent his life sword in hand, fighting unsuccessfully against the Bretons, whose two kings, Nomenoé and Erispoé, he had to recognize in turn; and against the people of Aquitaine, who, in full revolt, appealed for help to his brother, Louis the German. He was beaten everywhere and always: by the Bretons at Ballon (845) and Juvardeil (851); by the people of Aquitaine near Angoulême (845); and by the Northmen, who several times extorted heavy ransoms from him. Before long, too, Louis the German actually allied himself with the people of Brittany and Aquitaine, and invaded France at the summons of Charles the Bald's own vassals. Though the treaty of Coblenz (860) seemed to reconcile the two kings for the moment, no peace was ever possible in Charles the Bald's kingdom. His own son Charles, king of Aquitaine, revolted, and Salomon proclaimed himself king of Brittany in succession to Erispoé, who had been assassinated. To check the Bretons and the Normans, who were attacking from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, Charles the Bald found himself obliged to entrust the defence of the country to Robert the Strong, ancestor of the house of Capet and duke of the lands between Loire and Seine. Robert the Strong, however, though many times victorious over the incorrigible pirates, was killed by them in a fight at Brissarthe (866).

Division of the kingdom into large fiefs.

Despite all this, Charles spoke authoritatively in his capitularies, and though incapable of defending western France, coveted other crowns and looked obstinately eastwards. He managed to become king of Lorraine on the death of his nephew Lothair II., and emperor and king of Germany on that of his other nephew Louis II. (875); though only by breaking the compact of the year 800. In 876, the year before his death, he took a third crown, that of Italy, though not without a fresh defeat at Andernach by Louis the German's troops. His titles increased, indeed, but not his power; for while his kingdom was thus growing in area it was falling to pieces. The duchy with which he rewarded Robert the Strong was only a military command, but became a powerful fief. Baldwin I. (d. 879), count of Flanders, turned the country between the Scheldt, the Somme and the sea into another feudal principality. Aquitaine and Brittany were almost independent, Burgundy was in full revolt, and within thirty years Rollo, a Norman leader, was to be master of the whole of the lower Seine from the Cotentin to the Somme. The fact was that between the king's inability to defend the kingdom, and the powerlessness of nobles and peasants to protect themselves from pillage, every man made it his business to seek new protectors, and the country, in spite of Charles the Bald's efforts, began to be covered with strongholds, the peasant learning to live beneath the shelter of the donjon keeps. Such vassals gave themselves utterly to the lord who guarded them, working for him sword or pickaxe in hand. The king was far away, the lord close at hand. Hence the sixty years of terror and confusion which came between Charlemagne and the death of Charles the Bald suppressed the direct authority of the king in favour of the nobles, and prepared the way for a second destruction of the monarchy at the hands of a stronger power (see FEUDALISM).

Establishment of feudalism.

Before long Charles the Bald's followers were dictating to him; and in the disaffection caused by his feebleness and cowardice prelates and nobles allied themselves against him. If they acknowledged the king's authority at the assemblies of Yütz (near Thionville) in 844, they forced from him a promise that they should keep their fiefs and their dignities; and while establishing a right of control over all his actions they deprived him of his right of jurisdiction over them. Despite Charles's resistance his royal power dwindled steadily: an appeal to Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, entailed concessions to the Church. In 856 some of his vassals deserted him and went over to Louis the German. To win them back Charles had to sign a new charter, by the terms of which loyalty was no longer a one-sided engagement but a reciprocal contract between king and vassal. He gave up his personal right of distributing the fiefs and honours which were the price of adherence, and thus lost for the Carolingians the free disposal of the immense territories they had gradually usurped; they retained the over-lordship, it is true, but this over-lordship, without usufruct and without choice of tenant, was but a barren possession.

Decay of the Carolinglan power.

Like their territories public authority little by little slipped from the grasp of the Carolingians, largely because of their abuse of their too great power. They had concentrated the entire administration in their own hands. Like Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald were omnipotent. There were no provincial assemblies, no municipal bodies, no merchant-gilds, no autonomous churches; the people had no means of making themselves heard; they had no place in an administration which was completely in the hands of a central hierarchy of officials of all ranks, from dukes to _scabini_, with counts, viscounts and _centenarii_ in between. However, these dukes and counts were not merely officials: they too had become lords of _fideles_, of their own _advocati_, _centenarii_ and _scabini_, whom they nominated, and of all the free men of the county, who since Charlemagne's time had been first allowed and then commanded to "commend" themselves to a lord, receiving feudal benefices in return. Any deprivation or supersession of the count might impoverish, dispossess or ruin the vassals of the entire county; so that all, vassals or officials, small and great, feeling their danger, united their efforts, and lent each other mutual assistance against the permanent menace of an overweening monarchy. Hence, at the end of the 9th century, the heredity of offices as well as of fiefs. In the disordered state of society official stability was a valuable warrant of peace, and the administrative hierarchy, lay or spiritual, thus formed a mould for the hierarchy of feudalism. There was no struggle with the king, simply a cessation of obedience; for without strength or support in the kingdom he was powerless to resist. In vain Charles the Bald affirmed his royal authority in the capitularies of Quierzy-sur-Oise (857), Reims (860), Pistes (864), Gondreville (872) and Quierzy-sur-Oise (877); each time in exchange for assent to the royal will and renewal of oaths he had to acquiesce in new safeguards against himself and by so much to diminish that power of protection against violence and injustice for which the weak had always looked to the throne. Far from forbidding the relation of lord and vassal, Charles the Bald imposed it upon every man in his kingdom, himself proclaiming the real incapacity and failure of that theoretic royal power to which he laid claim. Henceforward royalty had no servants, since it performed no service. There was no longer the least hesitation over the choice between liberty with danger and subjection with safety; men sought and found in vassalage the right to live, and willingly bartered away their liberty for it.

Louis the Stammerer (877-879).

Louis III. and Carloman (879-884).

Charles the Fat. (884-888.)

The degeneration of the monarchy was clearly apparent on the death of Charles the Bald, when his son, Louis the Stammerer, was only assured of the throne, which had passed by right of birth under the Merovingians and been hereditary under the earlier Carolingians, through his election by nobles and bishops under the direction of Hugh the Abbot, successor of Robert the Strong, each voter having been won over by gift of abbeys, counties or manors. When Louis died two years later (879), the same nobles met, some at Creil, the rest at Meaux, and the first party chose Louis of Germany, who preferred Lorraine to the crown; while the rest anointed Louis III. and Carloman, sons of the late king, themselves deciding how the kingdom was to be divided between the two princes. Thus the king no longer chose his own vassals; but vassals and fief-holders actually elected their king according to the material advantages they expected from him. Louis III. and Carloman justified their election by their brilliant victories over the Normans at Saucourt (881) and near Epernay (883); but at their deaths (882-884), the nobles, instead of taking Louis's boy-son, Charles the Simple, as king, chose Charles the Fat, king of Germany, because he was emperor and seemed powerful. He united once more the dominions of Charlemagne; but he disgraced the imperial throne by his feebleness, and was incapable of using his immense army to defend Paris when it was besieged by the Normans. Expelled from Italy, he only came to France to buy a shameful peace. When he died in January 888 he had not a single faithful vassal, and the feudal lords resolved never again to place the sceptre in a hand that could not wield the sword.

Death-struggle of the Carolingians (888-987).

The death-struggle of the Carolingians lasted for a century of uncertainty and anarchy, during which time the bishops, counts and lords might well have suppressed the monarchy had they been hostile to it. Such, however, was not their policy; on the contrary, they needed a king to act as agent for their private interests, since he alone could invest their rank and dignities with an official and legitimate character. They did not at once agree on Charles's successor; for some of them chose Eudes (Odo), son of Robert the Strong, for his brilliant defence of Paris against the Normans in 885; others Guy, duke of Spoleto in Italy, who had himself crowned at Langres; while many wished for Arnulf, illegitimate son of Carloman, king of Germany and emperor. Eudes was victor in the struggle, and was crowned and anointed at Compiègne on the 29th of February 888; but five years later, meeting with defeat after defeat at the hands of the Normans, his followers deserted from him to Charles the Simple, grandson of Charles the Bald, who was also supported by Fulk, archbishop of Reims.

King Odo (888-893).

Charles the Simple (893-929).

Rudolph of Burgundy (923-936).

This first Carolingian restoration took place on the 28th of January 893, and thenceforward throughout this warlike period from 888 to 936 the crown passed from one dynasty to the other according to the interests of the nobles. After desperate strife, an agreement between the two rivals, Arnulf's support, and the death of Odo, secured it for Charles III., surnamed the Simple. His subjects remained faithful to him for a good while, as he put an end to the Norman invasions which had desolated the kingdom for two centuries, and cowed those barbarians, much to the benefit of France. By the treaty of St Clair-sur-Epte (911) their leader Rolf (Rollo) obtained one of Charles's daughters in marriage and the district of the Lower Seine which the Normans had long occupied, on condition that he and his men ceased their attacks and accepted Christianity. Having thus tranquillized the west, Charles took advantage of Louis the Child's death, and conquered Lorraine, in spite of opposition from Conrad, king of Germany (921). But his preference for his new conquest, and for a Lorrainer of low birth named Hagano, aroused the jealousy and discontent of his nobles. They first elected Robert, count of Paris (923), and then after his death in a successful battle near Soissons against Charles the Simple, Rudolph of Burgundy, his son-in-law. But Herbert of Vermandois, one of the successful combatants at Soissons, coveted the countship of Laon, which Rudolph refused him; and he thereupon proclaimed Charles the Simple, who had confided his cause to him, as king once more. Seeing his danger Rudolph ceded the countship to Herbert, and Charles was relegated to his prison until his death in 929. After unsuccessful wars against the nobles of the South, against the Normans, who asserted that they were bound to no one except Charles the Simple, and against the Hungarians (who, now the Normans were pacified, were acting their part in the East), Rudolph had a return of good fortune in the years between 930 and 936, despite the intrigues of Herbert of Vermandois. Upon his death the nobles assembled to elect a king; and Hugh the Great, Rudolph's brother-in-law, moved by irresolution as much as by prudence, instead of taking the crown, preferred to restore the Carolingians once more in the person of Charles the Simple's son, Louis d'Outremer, himself claiming numerous privileges and enjoying the exercise of power unencumbered by a title which carried with it the jealousy of the nobles.

Louis IV. the Foreigner (936-954.)

This restoration was no more peaceful than its predecessor. The Carolingians had as it were a fresh access of energy, and the struggle against the Robertinians went on relentlessly. Both sides employed similar methods: one was supported by Normandy, the other by Germany; the archbishop of Reims was for the Carolingians, the Robertinians had to be content with the less influential bishop of Sens. Louis soon proved to Hugh the Great, who was trying to play the part of a mayor of the palace, that he was by no means a _roi fainéant_; and the powerful duke of the Franks, growing uneasy, allied himself with Herbert of Vermandois, William of Normandy and his brother-in-law Otto I. king of Germany, who resented the loss of Lorraine. Louis defended himself with energy, aided chiefly by the nobles of the South, by his relative Edmund, king of the English, and then by Otto himself, whose brother-in-law he also had become. A peace advantageous to him was made in 942, and on the deaths of his two opponents, Herbert of Vermandois and William of Normandy, all seemed to be going well for him; but his guardianship of Richard, son of the duke of Normandy, aroused fresh strife, and on the 13th of July 945 he fell into an ambush and suffered a captivity similar to his father's of twenty-two years before. No one had befriended Charles the Simple, but Louis had his wife Gerberga, who won over to his cause the kings of England and Germany and even Hugh. Hugh set him free, insisting, as payment for his aid, on the cession of Laon, the capital of the kingdom and the last fortified town remaining to the Carolingians (946). Louis was hardly free before he took vengeance, harried the lands of his rival, restored to the archiepiscopal throne of Reims Artald, his faithful adviser, in place of the son of Herbert of Vermandois, and managed to get Hugh excommunicated by the council of Ingelheim (948) and by the pope. A two years' struggle wearied the rivals, and they made peace in 950. Louis once more held Laon, and in the following year further strengthened his position by a successful expedition into Burgundy. Still his last years were not peaceful; for besides civil wars there were two Hungarian invasions of France (951 and 954).

Lothair (954-986).

Louis's sudden death in 954 once more placed the Carolingian line in peril, since he had not had time to have his son Lothair crowned. For a third time Hugh had the disposal of the crown, and he was no more tempted to take it himself in 954 than in 923 or 936: it was too profitless a possession. Thanks to Hugh's support and to the good offices of Otto and his brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne and duke of Lorraine, Lothair was chosen king and crowned at Reims. Hugh exacted, as payment for his disinterestedness and fidelity, a renewal of his sovereignty over Burgundy with that of Aquitaine as well; he was in fact the viceroy of the kingdom, and others imitated him by demanding indemnities, privileges and confirmation of rights, as was customary at the beginning of a reign. Hugh strengthened his position in Burgundy, Lorraine and Normandy by means of marriages; but just as his power was at its height he died (956). His death and the minority of his sons, Hugh Capet and Eudes, gave the Carolingian dynasty thirty years more of life.

For nine years (956-965) Bruno, archbishop of Cologne, was regent of France, and thanks to him there was a kind of _entente cordiale_ between the Carolingians and the Robertinians and Otto. Bruno made Lothair recognize Hugh as duke of France and Eudes as duke of Burgundy; but the sons preserved the father's enmity towards king Louis, despite the archbishop's repeated efforts. His death deprived Lothair of a wise and devoted guardian, even if it did set him free from German influence; and the death of Odalric, archbishop of Reims, in 969, was another fatal loss for the Carolingians, succeeded as he was by Adalbero, who, though learned, pious and highly intelligent, was none the less ambitious. On the death of Otto I. (973) Lothair wished to regain Lorraine; but his success was small, owing to his limited resources and the uncertain support of his vassals. In 980, regretting his fruitless quarrel with Otto II., who had ravaged the whole country as far as Paris, and fearing that even with the support of the house of Vermandois he would be crushed like his father Louis IV. between the duke of France and the emperor, who could count on the archbishop of Reims, Lothair made peace with Otto--a great mistake, which cost him the prestige he had gained among his nobles by his fairly successful struggle with the emperor, drawing down upon him, moreover, the swift wrath of Hugh, who thought himself tricked. Otto, meanwhile, whom he was unwise enough to trust, made peace secretly with Hugh, as it was his interest to play off his two old enemies one against the other. However, Otto died first (983), leaving a three-year-old son, Otto III., and Lothair, hoping for Lorraine, upheld the claims of Henry of Bavaria, who wished to oust Otto. This was a war-signal for Archbishop Adalbero and his adviser Gerbert, devoted to the idea of the Roman empire, and determined that it should still be vested in the race of Otto, which had always been beneficent to the Church.

Louis V. (986-987).

They decided to set the Robertinians against the Carolingians, and on their advice Hugh Capet dispersed the assembly of Compiègne which Lothair had commissioned to examine Adalbero's behaviour. On Lothair's death in 986, Hugh surrounded his son and successor, Louis V., with intrigues. Louis was a weak-minded and violent young man with neither authority nor prestige, and Hugh tried to have him placed under tutelage. After Louis V.'s sudden death, aged twenty, in 987, Adalbero and Gerbert, with the support of the reformed Cluniac clergy, at the Assembly of Senlis eliminated from the succession the rightful heir, Charles of Lorraine, who, without influence or wealth, had become a stranger in his own country, and elected Hugh Capet, who, though rich and powerful, was superior neither in intellect nor character. Thus the triple alliance of Adalbero's bold and adroit imperialism with the cautious and vacillating ambition of the duke of the Franks, and the impolitic hostility towards Germany of the ruined Carolingians, resulted in the unlooked-for advent of the new Capetian dynasty.

Dismemberment of the kingdom.

This event completed the evolution of the forces that had produced feudalism, the basis of the medieval social system. The idea of public authority had been replaced by one that was simpler and therefore better fitted for a half-civilized society--that of dependence of the weak on the strong, voluntarily entered on by means of mutual contract. Feudalism had gained ground in the 8th century; feudalism it was which had raised the first Carolingian to the throne as being the richest and most powerful person in Austrasia; and Charlemagne with all his power had been as utterly unable as the Merovingians to revive the idea of an abstract and impersonal state. Charlemagne's vassals, however, had needed him; while from Charles the Bald onward it was the king who needed the vassals--a change more marked with each successive prince. The feudal system had in fact turned against the throne, the vassals using it to secure a permanent hold upon offices and fiefs, and to get possession of estates and of power. After Charles the Bald's death royalty had only, so to speak, a shell--administrative officialdom. No longer firmly rooted in the soil, the monarchy was helpless before local powers which confronted it, seized upon the land, and cut off connexion between throne and people. The king, the supreme lord, was the only lord without lands, a nomad in his own realms, merely lingering there until starved out. Feudalism claimed its new rights in the capitulary of Quierzy-sur-Oise in 857; the rights of the monarchy began to dwindle in 877.

But vassalage could only be a cause of disintegration, not of unity, and that this disintegration did not at once spread indefinitely was due to the dozen or so great military commands--Flanders, Burgundy, Aquitaine, &c.--which Charles the Bald had been obliged to establish on a strong territorial basis. One of these great vassals, the duke of France, was amply provided with estates and offices, in contrast to the landless Carolingian, and his power, like that of the future kings of Prussia and Austria, was based on military authority, for he had a frontier--that of Anjou. Then the inevitable crisis had come. For a hundred years the great feudal lords had disposed of the crown as they pleased, handing it back and forward from one dynasty to another. At the same time the contrast between the vast proportions of the Carolingian empire and its feeble administrative control over a still uncivilized community became more and more accentuated. The Empire crumbled away by degrees. Each country began to lead its own separate existence, stammering its own tongue; the different nations no longer understood one another, and no longer had any general ideas in common. The kingdoms of France and Germany, still too large, owed their existence to a series of dispossessions imposed on sovereigns too feeble to hold their own, and consisted of a great number of small states united by a very slight bond. At the end of the 10th century the duchy of France was the only central part of the kingdom which was still free and without organization. The end was bound to come, and the final struggle was between Laon, the royal capital, and Reims, the ecclesiastical capital, the former carrying with it the soil of France, and the latter the crown. The Capets captured the first in 985 and the other in 987. Thenceforth all was over for the Carolingians, who were left with no heritage save their great name.

The House of Capet.

Was the day won for the House of Capet? In the 11th century the kings of that line possessed meagre domains scattered about in the Île de France among the seigniorial possessions of Brie, Beauce, Beauvaisis and Valois. They were hemmed in by the powerful duchy of Normandy, the counties of Blois, Flanders and Champagne, and the duchy of Burgundy. Beyond these again stretched provinces practically impenetrable to royal influence: Brittany, Gascony, Toulouse, Septimania and the Spanish March. The monarchy lay stifling in the midst of a luxuriant feudal forest which surrounded its only two towns of any importance: Paris, the city of the future, and Orleans, the city of learning. Its power, exercised with an energy tempered by prudence, ran to waste like its wealth in a suzerainty over turbulent vassals devoid of common government or administration, and was undermined by the same lack of social discipline among its vassals which had sapped the power of the Carolingians. The new dynasty was thus the poorest and weakest of the great civil and ecclesiastical lordships which occupied the country from the estuary of the Scheldt to that of the Llobregat, and bounded approximately by the Meuse, the Saône and the ridge of the Cévennes; yet it cherished a great ambition which it revealed at times during its first century (987-1108)--a determination not to repeat the Carolingian failure. It had to wait two centuries after the revolution of 987 before it was strong enough to take up the dormant tradition of an authority like that of Rome; and until then it cunningly avoided unequal strife in which, victory being impossible, reverses might have weakened those titles, higher than any due to feudal rights, conferred by the heritage of the Caesars and the coronation at Reims, and held in reserve for the future.

Hugh Capet (987-996).

The new dynasty thus at first gave the impression rather of decrepitude than of youth, seeming more a continuation of the Carolingian monarchy than a new departure. Hugh Capet's reign was one of disturbance and danger; behind his dim personality may be perceived the struggle of greater forces--royalty and feudalism, the French clergy and the papacy, the kingdom of France and the Empire. Hugh Capet needed more than three years and the betrayal of his enemy into his hands before he could parry the attack of a quite second-rate adversary, Charles of Lorraine (990), the last descendant of Charlemagne. The insubordination of several great vassals--the count of Vermandois, the duke of Burgundy, the count of Flanders--who treated him as he had treated the Carolingian king; the treachery of Arnulf, archbishop of Reims, who let himself be won over by the empress Theophano; the papal hostility inflamed by the emperor against the claim of feudal France to independence,--all made it seem for a time as though the unity of the Roman empire of the West would be secured at Hugh's expense and in Otto's favour; but as a matter of fact this papal and imperial hostility ended by making the Capet dynasty a national one. When Hugh died in 996, he had succeeded in maintaining his liberty mainly, it is true, by diplomacy, not force, despite opposing powers and his own weakness. Above all, he had secured the future by associating his son Robert with him on the throne; and although the nobles and the archbishop of Reims were disturbed by this suspension of the feudal right of election, and tried to oppose it, they were unsuccessful.

Robert the Pious (996-1031).

Robert the Pious, a crowned monk, resembled his father in eschewing great schemes, whether from timidity or prudence; yet from 996 to 1031 he preserved intact the authority he had inherited from Hugh, despite many domestic disturbances. He maintained a defiant attitude towards Germany; increased his heritage; strengthened his royal title by the addition of that of duke of Burgundy after fourteen years of pillage; and augmented the royal domain by adding several countships on the south-east and north-west. Limited in capacity, he yet understood the art of acquisition.

Henry I. (1031-1060).

Henry I., his son, had to struggle with a powerful vassal, Eudes, count of Chartres and Troyes, and was obliged for a time to abandon his father's anti-German policy. Eudes, who was rash and adventurous, in alliance with the queen-mother, supported the second son, Robert, and captured the royal town of Sens. In order to retake it Henry ceded the beautiful valley of the Saône and the Rhône to the German emperor Conrad, and henceforth the kingdom of Burgundy was, like Lorraine, to follow the fortunes of Germany. Henry had besides to invest his brother with the duchy of Burgundy--a grave error which hampered French politics during three centuries. Like his father, he subsequently managed to retrieve some of the crown lands from William the Bastard, the too-powerful duke of Normandy; and he made a praiseworthy though fruitless attempt to regain possession of Lorraine for the French crown. Finally, by the coronation of his son Philip (1059) he confirmed the hereditary right of the Capets, soon to be superior to the elective rights of the bishops and great barons of the kingdom. The chief merit of these early Capets, indeed, was that they had sons, so that their dynasty lasted on without disastrous minorities or quarrels over the division of inheritance.

Philip I. (1060-1108).

Philip I. achieved nothing during his long reign of forty-eight years except the necessary son, Louis the Fat. Unsuccessful even in small undertakings he was utterly incapable of great ones; and the two important events of his reign took place, the one against his will, the other without his help. The first, which lessened Norman aggression in his kingdom, was William the Bastard's conquest of England (1066); the second was the First Crusade preached by the French pope Urban II. (1095). A few half-hearted campaigns against recalcitrant vassals and a long and obstinate quarrel with the papacy over his adulterous union with Bertrade de Montfort, countess of Anjou, represented the total activity of Philip's reign; he was greedy and venal, by no means disdaining the petty profits of brigandage, and he never left his own domains.

Louis VI. the Fat (1108-1137).

After a century's lethargy the house of Capet awoke once more with Louis VI. and began the destruction of the feudal polity. For thirty-four years of increasing warfare this active and energetic king, this brave and persevering soldier, never spared himself, energetically policing the royal demesne against such pillagers as Hugh of Le Puiset or Thomas of Marle. There was, however, but little difference yet between a count of Flanders or of Chartres and Louis VI., the possessor of a but small and perpetually disturbed realm, who was praised by his minister, the monk Suger, for making his power felt as far as distant Berril. This was clearly shown when he attempted to force the great feudal lords to recognize his authority. His bold endeavour to establish William Clito in Flanders ended in failure; and his want of strength was particularly humiliating in his unfortunate struggle with Henry I., king of the English and duke of Normandy, who was powerful and well served, the real master of a comparatively weak baronage. Louis only escaped being crushed because he remembered, as did his successors for long after him, that his house owed its power to the Church.

The Church has never loved weakness; she has always had a secret sympathy for power, whatever its source, when she could hope to capture it and make it serve her ends. Louis VI. defended her against feudal robbers; and she supported him in his struggles against the nobles, making him, moreover, by his son's marriage with the heiress of Aquitaine, the greatest and richest landholder of the kingdom. But Louis was not the obedient tool she wished for. With equal firmness and success he vindicated his rights, whether against the indirect attacks of the papacy on his independence, or the claims of the ecclesiastical courts which, in principle, he made subordinate to the jurisdiction of the crown; whether in episcopal elections, or in ecclesiastical reforms which might possibly imperil his power or his revenues. The prestige of this energetic king, protector of the Church, of the infant communes in the towns, and of the peasants as against the constant oppressions of feudalism, became still greater at the end of his reign, when an invasion of the German emperor Henry V. in alliance with Henry Beauclerk of Normandy (Henry I. of England), rallied his subjects round the oriflamme of St Denis, awakening throughout northern France the unanimous and novel sentiment of national danger.

Louis VII. the Young (1137-1180).

The second crusade.

Unfortunately his successor, Louis VII., almost destroyed his work by a colossal blunder, although circumstances seemed much in his favour. Germany and England, the two powers especially to be dreaded, were busy with internal troubles and quarrels of succession. On the other hand, thanks to his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, Louis's own domains had been increased by the greater part of the country between the Loire and the Pyrenees; while his father's minister, the monk Suger, continued to assist him with his moderation and prudence. His first successes against Theobald of Champagne, who for thirty years had been the most dangerous of the great French barons and had refused a vassal's services to Louis VI., as well as the adroit diplomacy with which he wrested from Geoffrey the Fair, count of Anjou, a part of the Norman Vexin long claimed by the French kings, in exchange for permitting him to conquer Normandy, augured well for his boldness and activity, had he but confined them to serving his own interests. The second crusade, undertaken to expiate his burning of the church of Vitry, inaugurated a series of magnificent but fruitless exploits; while his wife was the cause of domestic quarrels still more disastrous. Piety and a thirst for glory impelled Louis to take the lead in this fresh expedition to the Holy Land, despite the opposition of Suger, and the hesitation of the pope, Bernard of Clairvaux and the barons. The alliance with the German king Conrad III. only enhanced the difficulties of an enterprise already made hazardous by the misunderstandings between Greeks and Latins. The Crusade ended in the double disaster of military defeat and martial dishonour (1147-1149); and Suger's death in 1151 deprived Louis of a counsellor who had exercised the regency skilfully and with success, just at the very moment when his divorce from Eleanor was to jeopardize the fortunes of the Capets.

Rivalry of the Capets and Angevins.

For the proud and passionate Eleanor married, two months later (May 1152), the young Henry, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy, who held, besides these great fiefs, the whole of the south-west of France, and in two years' time the crown of England as well. Henry and Louis at once engaged in the first Capet-Angevin duel, destined to last a hundred years (1152-1242). When France and England thus entered European history, their conditions were far from being equal. In England royal power was strong; the size of the Angevin empire was vast, and the succession assured. It was only abuse of their too-great powers that ruined the early Angevin kings. France in the 12th century was merely a federation of separate states, jealously independent, which the king had to negotiate with rather than rule; while his own possessions, shorn of the rich heritage of Aquitaine, were, so to speak, swamped by those of the English king. For some time it was feared that the French kingdom would be entirely absorbed in consequence of the marriage between Louis's daughter and Henry II.'s eldest son. The two rivals were typical of their states, Henry II. being markedly superior to Louis in political resource, military talent and energy. He failed, however, to realize his ambition of shutting in the Capet king and isolating him from the rest of Europe by crafty alliances, notably that with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa--while watching an opportunity to supplant him upon the French throne. It is extraordinary that Louis should have escaped final destruction, considering that Henry had subdued Scotland, retaken Anjou from his brother Geoffrey, won a hold over Brittany, and schemed successfully for Languedoc. But the Church once more came to the rescue of her devoted son. The retreat to France of Pope Alexander III., after he had been driven from Rome by the emperor Frederick in favour of the anti-pope Victor, revived Louis's moral prestige. Henry II.'s quarrel with Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, which ran its course in France (1164-1171) as a struggle for the independence and reform of the Church, both threatened by the Constitutions of Clarendon, and ended with the murder of Becket in 1172, gave Louis yet another advantage over his rival. Finally the birth of Philip Augustus (1165), after thirty years of childless wedlock, saved the kingdom from a war of succession just at the time when the powerful Angevin sway, based entirely upon force, was jeopardized by the rebellion of Henry II.'s sons against their father. Louis naturally joined the coalition of 1173, but showed no more vigour in this than in his other wars; and his fate would have been sealed had not the pope checked Henry by the threat of an interdict, and reconciled the combatants (1177). Louis had still time left to effect the coronation of his son Philip Augustus (1179), and to associate him with himself in the exercise of the royal power for which he had grown too old and infirm.

Philip Augustus (1180-1223).

Philip Augustus, who was to be the bitterest enemy of Henry II. and the Angevins, was barely twenty before he revealed the full measure of his cold energy and unscrupulous ambition. In five years (1180-1186) he rid himself of the overshadowing power of Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, and his own uncles, the counts of Champagne; while the treaty of May 20th, 1186, was his first rough lesson to the feudal leagues, which he had reduced to powerlessness, and to the subjugated duke of Burgundy and count of Flanders. Northern and eastern France recognized the suzerainty of the Capet, and Philip Augustus was now bold enough to attack Henry II., the master of the west, whose friendly neutrality (assured by the treaty of Gisors) had made possible the successive defeats of the great French barons. Like his father, Philip understood how to make capital out of the quarrels of the aged and ailing Henry II. with his sons, especially with Richard, who claimed his French heritage in his father's lifetime, and raised up enemies for the disunited Angevins even in Germany. After two years of constant defeat, Henry's capitulation at Azai proved once more that fortune is never with the old. The English king had to submit himself to "the advice and desire of the king of France," doing him homage for all continental fiefs (1187-1189).

Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion.

The defection of his favourite son John gave Henry his deathblow, and Philip Augustus found himself confronted by a new king of England, Richard Coeur de Lion, as powerful, besides being younger and more energetic. Philip's ambition could not rest satisfied with the petty principalities of Amiens, Vermandois and Valois, which he had added to the royal demesne. The third crusade, undertaken, sorely against Philip's will, in alliance with Richard, only increased the latent hostility between the two kings; and in 1191 Philip abandoned the enterprise in order to return to France and try to plunder his absent rival. Despite his solemn oath no scruples troubled him: witness the large sums of money he offered to the emperor Henry VI. if he would detain Richard, who had been made prisoner by the duke of Austria on his return from the crusade; and his negotiations with his brother John Lackland, whom he acknowledged king of England in exchange for the cession of Normandy. But Henry VI. suddenly liberated Richard, and in five years that "devil set free" took from Philip all the profit of his trickery, and shut him off from Normandy by the strong fortress of Château-Gaillard (1194-1199).

Philip Augustus and John Lackland.

Happily an accident which caused Richard's death at the siege of Chalus, and the evil imbecility of his brother and successor, John Lackland, brilliantly restored the fortunes of the Capets. The quarrel between John and his nephew Arthur of Brittany gave Philip Augustus one of those opportunities of profiting by family discord which, coinciding with discontent among the various peoples subject to the house of Anjou, had stood him in such good stead against Henry II. and Richard. He demanded renunciation on John's part, not of Anjou only, but of Poitou and Normandy--of all his French-speaking possessions, in fact--in favour of Arthur, who was supported by William des Roches, the most powerful lord of the region of the Loire. Philip's divorce from Ingeborg of Denmark, who appealed successfully to Pope Innocent III., merely delayed the inevitable conflict. John of England, moreover, was a past-master in the art of making enemies of his friends, and his conduct towards his vassals of Aquitaine furnished a judicial pretext for conquest. The royal judges at Paris condemned John, as a felon, to death and the forfeiture of his fiefs (1203), and the murder of Arthur completed his ruin. Philip Augustus made a vigorous onslaught on Normandy in right of justice and of superior force, took the formidable fortress of Château-Gaillard on the Seine after several months' siege, and invested Rouen, which John abandoned, fleeing to England. In Anjou, Touraine, Maine and Poitou, lords, towns and abbeys made their submission, won over by Philip's bribes despite Pope Innocent III.'s attempts at intervention. In 1208 John was obliged to own the Plantagenet continental power as lost. There were no longer two rival monarchies in France; the feudal equilibrium was destroyed, to the advantage of the duchy of France.